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- #darkweb
Documentary, Inside the Dark Web 2014
#DarkWeb
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00:01It's just 25 years since the World Wide Web was created.
00:06It now touches all of our lives,
00:08our personal information and data swirling through the internet on a daily basis.
00:14Yet it's now caught in the greatest controversy of its life, surveillance.
00:19This is a spy master's dream.
00:22No spy of the previous generations could have imagined that we would all volunteer for the world's best tracking device.
00:28The revelations of US intelligence contractor Edward Snowden have led many to ask if the web we love has been turned against us.
00:38They don't just want your search data or your email, they want everything.
00:42And as you are being surveilled 24-7, you are more under control, you are less free.
00:49Leading to soul searching amongst those responsible for the web itself.
00:53I used to think that in some countries you worry about the government, in some countries you worry about the corporation.
01:00I realise now that that all is naive.
01:03But thanks to a collection of brilliant thinkers and researchers, science has been fighting back.
01:09It's really no surprise that the privacy issue has unfolded the way it has.
01:14Developing technology to defeat surveillance, protecting activists.
01:21They tried to intimidate me. I knew that they don't know anything.
01:25And in the process, coming into conflict with global power.
01:29They're detaining me at airports, threatening me.
01:31But now, thanks to a new digital currency.
01:36If you're buying less than half of Bitcoin, you'll have to go to market price.
01:40This technology is sending lawmakers into a panic, due to the growth of a new black market in the dark web.
01:48It was like a buffet dinner for narcotics.
01:52Our detection rate is dropping. It's risk-free crime.
01:54This is the story of a battle to shape the technology which now defines our world.
02:01And whoever wins, will influence not only the future of the internet, but the very idea of what it means to be free.
02:09The sickness that befalls the internet is something that befalls the whole world.
02:24Where does the outside world stop? And private space begin?
02:29What details of your life are you willing to share with strangers?
02:37Take this house.
02:41Every morning, lights come on.
02:44Coffee brews.
02:48Automatically.
02:49Technology just like this is increasingly being installed into millions of homes across the world.
02:57And it promises to change the way we live forever.
03:01So there's sensors of all kinds. There's lights and locks and thermostats.
03:06And once they're connected, then our platform can make them do whatever you want them to do.
03:11So as an example, if I wake up in the morning, the house knows that I'm waking up.
03:15It can wake up with me.
03:17When we walk in the kitchen, it will play the local news and sort of greet us into the day,
03:22tell us the weather forecast so we know how to dress for the day and so on.
03:27This technology is known as the Internet of Things,
03:31where the objects in our houses, kitchen appliances, anything electronic,
03:35can be connected to the internet.
03:37But for it to be useful, we're going to have to share intimate details of our private life.
03:42So this is the SmartThings app. It can run on your mobile phone or on a tablet or something like that.
03:49It can do things like look at the comings and goings of family members.
03:53It can automatically detect when we come and go based on our mobile phones.
03:56Or you can have it detect your presence with a little sensor you can put in your car or something like that.
04:01So when we leave the house and there's no one home, that's when it'll lock up and shut down all of the electricity use and so on.
04:06For most of us, this is deeply private information. Yet once we hand it over, we have to trust a company to keep it confidential.
04:15The consumer really owns 100% of their own data. So they're opting in.
04:19It's not something where that data would ever be shared without their giving the permission.
04:23This house represents a new normal, where even the movements within our own home are documented and stored.
04:37It's a new frontier. The internet is asking us to redefine what we consider private.
04:44To understand the enormous changes taking place, it's necessary to come here.
05:00Almost 150 years ago, this hut was on the frontier of the world's first information revolution, the telegraph.
05:08It was a crucial hub for a global network of wires, a role that is just as important today.
05:17Seeing the cables in a room like this shows that the physical infrastructure needed to move information around the world hasn't changed very much in the past hundred years.
05:27I think that the internet we tend to think of as a cloud floating somewhere off in the cyberspace.
05:33There are physical wires, physical cables, and sometimes wireless signals that are communicating with each other.
05:40Cornwall, where the telegraph cables come ashore, still remains crucial for today's internet.
05:4825% of all traffic passes through here.
05:51Running from the United States and other places to the United Kingdom are a large number of the most significant fibre optic cables that carry huge amounts of data.
06:03Alongside this information superhighway is a site belonging to the UK government, GCHQ Bude.
06:12We now know that this listening station has been gathering and analysing everything that comes across these wires.
06:18Any data that passes across the internet could theoretically come down these cables.
06:24So that's emails, websites, the BitTorrent downloads, the films that you're accessing through Netflix and online services.
06:32The sheer amount of data captured here is almost impossible to comprehend.
06:37In terms of what the GCHQ were looking at, we've got from internal documents that in 2011 they were tapping 200 10-gigabit cables coming into Cornwall.
06:49To give a rough idea of how much data that is, if you were to digitise the entire contents of the British Library,
06:56then you could transfer it down that set of cables in about 40 seconds.
06:59Tapping the wires is surprisingly simple.
07:11The data carried by the fibre optic cable just needs to be diverted.
07:18A fibre optic cable signal is a beam of light travelling down a cable made from glass.
07:23Pulses of light represent the pieces of information travelling across the internet, which is the emails, the web pages, everything that's going over the internet.
07:34Every 50 miles or so, that signal becomes sufficiently weak that it needs to be repeated.
07:41And this is the weak spot.
07:42And it's very easy to insert an optical tap at that point.
07:48And that's just what GCHQ did.
07:52A device was placed into the beam of data, which created a mirror image of the millions of emails, web searches and internet traffic passing through the cables every second.
08:02What you effectively get is two copies of the signal, one going off to the GCHQ and one carrying on in its original destination.
08:23All of the information going over those cables is able to be replayed over the course of three days.
08:27So you can rewind and see what was going over the internet at a particular moment.
08:32Analyzing this amount of data is an impressive achievement, but it also attracts criticism.
08:38When you see the capacity and the potential for that technology and the fact that it is being used without transparency and without very high levels of accountability,
08:48it's incredibly concerning because the power of that data to predict and analyze what we're going to do is very, very high.
08:56And giving that power to somebody else, regardless of the original or stated intentions, is very worrying.
09:01We only know about the GCHQ project thanks to documents released by US whistleblower Edward Snowden.
09:17And the revelation has begun to change the way many people think about privacy and the internet.
09:22Among them, the inventor of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee.
09:28Information is a funny sort of power.
09:31The way a government can use it to keep control of its citizens is insidious and sneaky, nasty in some cases.
09:40We have to all learn more about it.
09:42And we have to, in a way, rethink, rebase a lot of our philosophy.
09:51Part of changing that philosophy is to understand that our lives are not analyzed in the first instance by people, but by computer programs.
10:02Some people just don't have an understanding about what's possible.
10:05I've heard people say, well, we know nobody's reading our emails because they don't have enough people.
10:09Actually, hello, it's not, these emails are not being read by people, they're being read by machines.
10:17They're being read by machines which can do the sorts of things that search engines do.
10:21They can look at all the emails and look at all the social connections and can watch.
10:27Sometimes these machines learn how to spot trends,
10:32can build systems which will just watch a huge amount of data and start to pick things out
10:36and then will suggest to the security agency, well, these people need to be investigated.
10:45But then the thing could be wrong.
10:49Boy, we have to have a protection.
10:51The Snowden revelations have generated greater interest than ever in how the internet is being used for the purposes of surveillance.
10:59But watching isn't just done by governments.
11:08The most detailed documenting of our lives is done by technology companies.
11:13Two years ago, tech researcher Julia Angwin decided to investigate how much these companies track our behavior daily.
11:20Her findings give us one of the best pictures yet of just who is watching us online every minute of every day.
11:28When I talk about the underbelly of the information revolution, I'm really talking about the unseen downside of the information revolution.
11:38You know, we obviously have seen all the benefits of having all this information at our fingertips.
11:43But we're just awakening to the fact that we're also being surveilled all the time.
11:48We're being monitored in ways that were never before possible.
11:50Every time we browse the internet, what we do can be collated and sold to advertisers.
12:02So basically online, there are hundreds of companies that sort of install invisible tracking technology on the website.
12:09They've installed basically a serial number on your computer and they watch you whenever they see you across the web and build a dossier about your reading habits, your shopping habits, whatever they can obtain.
12:23And then there's a real market for that data. They buy and sell it and there's an online auction bidding for information about you.
12:29And so the people who know your browsing habits can also discover your deepest secrets and then sell them to the highest bidder.
12:42So let's say a woman takes a pregnancy test and finds out she is pregnant, then she might go look for something online.
12:49By making pregnancy related searches, this woman has become a hot property for the people looking for a good target for advertising.
12:57The process of selling then begins. Within seconds, she is identified by the companies watching her. Her profile is now sold multiple times.
13:11She will then find herself bombarded with ads relating to pregnancy.
13:15She may well find that she will be followed around the web by ads and that's really a result of that auction house. Now they will say to you that they know she's pregnant but they don't know her name.
13:27But what's happening is now that more and more that information is really not that anonymous. You know, it's sort of like if they know you're pregnant and they know where you live, yes, maybe they don't know your name, that's just because they haven't bothered to look it up.
13:38We continually create new information about ourselves and this information gives a continual window into our behaviors and habits.
13:49The next stage of surveillance comes from the offices and buildings around us, sending out Wi-Fi signals across the city.
13:57Okay, so let's see how many signals we have right here, Wi-Fi. So we have 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 20, 21. Oh, and a few more just added themselves. So we're around 25 right now, right here on this corner.
14:14We have 25 signals that are reaching out, basically sending a little signal to my phone saying I'm here and my phone is sending a signal back saying I'm also here.
14:20As long as your phone's Wi-Fi connection is on and connected to a signal, you can be tracked.
14:28Google, Apple, other big companies are racing to map the whole world using Wi-Fi signals and then whenever your phone is somewhere, they know exactly how far you are from the closest Wi-Fi signal and they can map you much more precisely even than GPS.
14:42And we now know that this data has been seized by governments as part of their internet surveillance operations.
14:50The MSA was like, oh, that's an awesome way to track people. Let's scoop up that information too.
14:58So we have seen that the governments find all this data irresistible.
15:05But is this simply a matter of principle?
15:08Is losing privacy ultimately the price we pay for peaceful streets and freedom from terror attacks?
15:22This man thinks we should look deeper.
15:28Bruce Schneier is a leading internet security expert.
15:34He was part of the team which first analyzed the Snowden documents.
15:38They don't just want your search data or your email.
15:41They want everything.
15:42They want to tie it to your real-world behaviors, right?
15:45Location data from your cell phone.
15:47And it's these correlations.
15:49And as you are being surveilled 24-7, you are more under control, right?
15:56You are less free.
15:57You are less autonomous.
15:59Schneier believes the ultimate result from all this surveillance may be a loss of freedom.
16:05What data does is give someone control over you.
16:09The reason Google and Facebook are collecting this is for psychological manipulation.
16:14That's their stated business purpose, right? Advertising.
16:19They want to convince you to buy things you might not want to buy otherwise.
16:25And so that data is all about control.
16:30Governments collect it also for control, right?
16:33They want to control their population.
16:35Maybe they're concerned about dissidents.
16:37Maybe they're concerned about criminals.
16:43It's hard to imagine that this data can exert such a level of potential control over us.
16:50But looking for the patterns in the data can give anyone analyzing it huge power.
16:57What's become increasingly understood is how much is revealed by metadata, by the information about who is sending messages and how often they're sending them to each other.
17:09This reveals information about our social networks.
17:12It can reveal information about the places that we go on a day-to-day basis.
17:17All this metadata stacks up to allow a very detailed view into our lives.
17:22And increasingly what we find is that these patterns of communication can even be used in a predictive sense to determine factors about our lives.
17:31And what some people fear is what the spread of this analysis could lead to.
17:35Ultimately the concern of this is that in a dystopian scenario you have a situation where every facet of your life is something that is open to analysis by whoever has access to the data.
17:49They can look at the likelihood that you should be given health insurance because you come from a family that has a history of heart disease.
17:58They can look at the likelihood that you're going to get Alzheimer's disease because of the amount of active intellectual entertainment you take part in on a day-to-day basis.
18:07And when you start giving this level of minute control over people's lives then you allow far too much power over individuals.
18:14The picture painted is certainly dark.
18:21But there is another way.
18:24It comes from the insights of a scientist whose work once seemed like a footnote in the history of the Internet.
18:34Until now.
18:36The story begins in the late 70s in Berkeley, California.
18:53Governments and companies had begun to harness the power of computing.
18:56They seem to promise a future of efficiency, of problems being overcome thanks to technology.
19:09Yet not everyone was so convinced.
19:12David Chaum was a computer scientist at Berkeley.
19:16For him a world in which we would become increasingly joined together by machines in a network held grave dangers.
19:23As computing advanced, he grew increasingly convinced of the threats these networks could pose.
19:33David Chaum was very far ahead of his time.
19:36He predicted in the early 1980s concerns that would arise on the Internet 15 or 20 years later.
19:43The whole field of traffic analysis that allows you to predict the behaviors of individuals, not by looking at the contents of their emails, but by looking at the patterns of communication.
19:51David Chaum, to some extent, foresaw that and solved the problem.
20:01Well, it's sad to me, but it is really no surprise that the privacy issue has unfolded the way it has.
20:11I spelled it out in the early publications in the 80s.
20:14Chaum's papers explained that in a future world where we would increasingly use computers, it would be easy to conduct mass surveillance.
20:25Chaum wanted to find a way to stop it.
20:27I always had a deep feeling that privacy is intimately tied to human potential and that it's an extraordinarily important aspect of democracy.
20:44Chaum focused on the new technology of emails.
20:50Anyone watching the network through which these messages traveled could find out enormous amounts about that person.
20:57He wanted to make this more difficult.
20:59Well, I was driving from Berkeley to Santa Barbara along the coastline in my VW campervan and out of nowhere, you know, beautiful scenery.
21:12I was just driving along and it occurred to me how to solve this problem I've been trying to solve for a long time.
21:18Yeah, it was a kind of a, you know, a eureka moment. I felt like, hey, this is it.
21:23Chaum's focus was the pattern of communications that a computer made on the network.
21:32If that pattern could be disguised using cryptography, it would be harder for anyone watching to identify individuals and carry out effective surveillance.
21:42And Chaum's system had a twist.
21:45Cryptography has traditionally been used to provide secrecy for message content.
21:54And so I used this message secrecy technology of encryption to actually protect the metadata of who talks to who and when.
22:05And that was quite a paradigm shift.
22:08Chaum had realized something about surveillance, who we talk to and when is just as important as what we say.
22:20The key to avoiding this type of traffic analysis was to render the user effectively anonymous.
22:25But he realized that wasn't enough.
22:35He wanted to build a secure network.
22:38And to do this, he needed more anonymous users.
22:44One cannot be anonymous alone.
22:47It can only be anonymous relative to a set of people.
22:50The more anonymous users you can gather together in a network, the harder it becomes for someone watching to keep track of them.
23:00Especially if they're mixed up.
23:03And so a whole batch of input messages from different people are shuffled.
23:09And then sent to another computer and shuffled again and so forth.
23:14And you can't tell, as an observer of the network, which item that went in corresponds to which item coming out.
23:28David Chaum was trying to provide protection against a world in which our communications would be analyzed and potentially used against us.
23:37Chaum's response to this was to say, in order to have a free society, we need to have freedom from analysis of our behaviors and our communications.
23:47But Chaum's system didn't take off because communication using email was still the preserve of a few academics and technicians.
23:56Yet his insights weren't forgotten.
24:00Within a decade, the arrival of the World Wide Web took communication increasingly online.
24:16The US government understood the importance of protecting its own online communications from surveillance.
24:22It began to put money into research.
24:24At the US Naval Research Laboratory, a team led by scientist Paul Syverson got to work.
24:35Suppose we wanted to have a system where people could communicate back to their home office or with each other over the internet,
24:51but without people being able to associate source and destination.
24:58Syverson soon came across the work of David Chaum.
25:02The first work which is associated with this area is the work of David Chaum.
25:09A Chaum mix basically gets its security because it takes in a bunch of messages and then reorders them and changes their appearance and spews them out.
25:19But this was now the age of the World Wide Web.
25:26The Navy wanted to develop anonymous communications for this new era.
25:34So Syverson and his colleagues set to work on building a system that could be used by operatives across the world.
25:40You have enough of a network with enough distribution that it's going to be very hard for an adversary to be in all the places and to see all the traffic wherever it is.
25:57Syverson's system was called the TOR network. TOR stands for the onion router. It works like this.
26:08A user wants to visit a website, but doesn't want to reveal their IP address, the marker that identifies their computer.
26:17As they send the request, three layers of encryption are placed around it like the layers of an onion.
26:24The message is then sent through a series of computers which have volunteered to act as relay points.
26:30As the message passes from computer to computer, a layer of encryption is removed.
26:39Each time it is removed, all the relay computer can see is an order which tells it to pass the message on.
26:45The final computer relay decrypts the innermost layer of encryption, revealing the content of the communication.
26:53However, importantly, the identity of the user is hidden.
27:00Somebody who wants to look at things around the web and not necessarily have people know what he's interested in,
27:08might just be the local internet services provider, he doesn't want them to know which things he's looking at,
27:15but it might be also the destination.
27:20Syverson's system worked.
27:24It was now possible to surf the net without being watched.
27:31As David Chaum had observed, the more anonymous people, the better the security.
27:36The Navy had what they believed was a smart way of achieving that.
27:45Open the network out to everyone.
27:50It's not enough for a government system to carry traffic just for the government.
27:55It also has to carry traffic for other people.
27:59Part of anonymity is having a large number of people who are also anonymous,
28:03because you can't be anonymous on your own.
28:04What Syverson and his team had done, building on the work of David Chaum,
28:11would begin to revolutionise the way that people could operate online.
28:19Over the coming years, the Tor network expanded as more people volunteered to become relay computers,
28:25the points through which the messages could be relayed.
28:30What Tor did was it made a usable system for people.
28:33People wanted to protect what they were looking at on the internet from being watched by their ISP,
28:38or their government, or the company that they're working for at the time.
28:41But Tor's success wasn't just down to the Navy.
28:50In the mid-2000s, they handed the network over to a non-profit organisation who overhauled the system.
28:56Now the network would be represented by people like this.
29:03Jake Applebaum.
29:05Researchers dedicated to the opportunities they felt Tor could give for free speech.
29:12We work with the research community all around the world, the academic community, the hacker community.
29:21It's a free software project, so that means that all the source code is available.
29:25That means that anyone can look at it and see how it works.
29:27And that means everybody that does and shares it with us helps improve the program for everyone else on the planet,
29:33and the network as a whole.
29:36Applebaum now travels the world promoting the use of the software.
29:44The Tor network gives each person the ability to read without creating a data trail that will later be used against them.
29:51It gives every person a voice.
29:54Every person has the right to read and to speak freely, not one human excluded.
29:59And one place Tor has become important is the Middle East.
30:03During the Arab Spring, as disturbances spread across the region, it became a vital tool for dissidents.
30:13Especially in places like Syria.
30:18One of those who used it from the beginning was opposition activist Reem Al Asil.
30:26I found out first about Tor back in 2011.
30:31Surveillance in Syria is a very big problem for activists, or for anyone even, because the Syrian regime are trying all the time to get into people's emails and Facebook, to see what they are up to, what they are doing.
30:48By the time the Syrian uprising happened, the Tor project had developed a browser, which made downloading the software very simple.
30:57You basically go and download Tor in your computer and once it's installed, whenever you want to browse the web, you go and click on it, just like Internet Explorer or Google Chrome.
31:11Reem had personal experience of the protection offered by Tor when she was arrested by the secret police.
31:22I denied having any relation with opposition work or anything.
31:28They tried to intimidate me and they said,
31:31well, see, we know everything about you so now we need you to tell us.
31:36But I knew that they don't know anything.
31:39By using Tor, I was an anonymous user.
31:42So they couldn't tell that Reem is doing so and so, is watching so and so.
31:48So that's why Tor protected me in this way.
31:54Syria was not the only place where Tor was vital.
31:57It's used in China and Iran.
32:06In any country where Internet access is restricted, Tor can be used by citizens to avoid the gaze of the authorities.
32:16China, for example, regularly attacks and blocks the Tor network.
32:20And they don't attack us directly so much as they actually attack people in China using Tor.
32:25They stop them from using the Tor network.
32:29But Tor wasn't just helping those inside repressive regimes.
32:34It was now being used for whistleblowing in the West.
32:39Through WikiLeaks.
32:42Founded by Julian Assange.
32:50Assange has spent the last two years under the protection of the Ecuadorian Embassy in London.
32:55He is fighting extradition to Sweden on sexual assault charges.
33:00Charges he denies.
33:02I've been involved in cryptography and anonymous communications for almost 20 years, so since the early 1990s.
33:09Cryptographic anonymity didn't come from nowhere.
33:12It was a long-standing quest, which had a holy grail, which is to be able to communicate individual to individual freely and anonymously.
33:20Tor was the first anonymous protocol that got the balance right.
33:28From its early years, people who wanted to submit documents anonymously to WikiLeaks could use Tor.
33:35Tor was and is one of the mechanisms which we have received important documents, yes.
33:45One man who provided a link between WikiLeaks and the Tor project was Jake Applebaum.
33:50Sources that want to leak documents need to be able to communicate with WikiLeaks.
33:58And it has always been the case that they have offered a Tor hidden service.
34:02And that Tor hidden service allows people to reach the WikiLeaks submission engine.
34:10In 2010, what could be achieved when web activism met anonymity was revealed to the world?
34:17WikiLeaks received a huge leak of confidential U.S. government material, mainly relating to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
34:30The first release was this footage, which showed a U.S. Apache helicopter attack in Iraq.
34:41Light them all up.
34:42Come on, come here.
34:43I see you guys got that guy crawling right now on the curb.
34:48Yeah, I got him.
34:50Among those dead were two journalists from Reuters, Samir Shmaag and Namir Noor Eldeen.
34:57The Americans investigated, but say there was no wrongdoing.
35:02Yet this footage would never have become public if Chelsea Manning, a U.S. contractor in Iraq, hadn't leaked it.
35:10Chelsea Manning has said that to the court that he used Tor, amongst a number of other things, to submit documents to WikiLeaks.
35:18Obviously, we can't comment on that because we have an obligation to protect our sources.
35:26The release of the documents provided by Manning, which culminated in 250,000 cables, seemed to reveal the power of anonymity through encryption.
35:35Because with encryption, two people can come together to communicate privately, the full might of a superpower cannot break that encryption if it is properly implemented.
35:49And that's an extraordinary thing, where individuals are given a certain type of freedom of action that is equivalent to the freedom of action that a superpower has.
35:57But it wasn't the technology that let Manning down.
36:02He confessed what he had done to a contact and was arrested.
36:08Those who had used anonymity to leak secrets were now under fire.
36:15WikiLeaks had already been criticized for the release of unredacted documents revealing the names of Afghans who had assisted the U.S.
36:28The U.S. government was also on the attack.
36:30The United States strongly condemns the illegal disclosure of classified information.
36:38It puts people's lives in danger, threatens our national security.
36:45Meanwhile, the Tor project, started by the U.S. government, was becoming a target.
36:50It's very funny, right? Because on the one hand, these people are funding Tor because they say they believe in anonymity.
36:59And on the other hand, they're detaining me at airports, you know, threatening me and doing things like that.
37:05And they've even said to me, we love what you do in Iran and in China and helping Tibetan people.
37:10We love all the stuff that you're doing, but why do you have to do it here?
37:13Thanks to Edward Snowden, we now know that this culminated in the Tor network being the focus of failed attacks by America's National Security Agency.
37:26They revealed their frustration in a confidential PowerPoint presentation called Tor Stinks,
37:32which set out the ways in which the NSA had tried to crack the network.
37:37They think Tor stinks because they want to attack people.
37:40And sometimes technology makes that harder.
37:43It is because the users have something which bothers them, which is real autonomy.
37:49It gives them true privacy and security.
37:52Tor, invented and funded by the U.S. government, was now used by activists, journalists, anybody who wanted to communicate anonymously.
38:01And it wasn't long before its potential began to attract a darker type of user.
38:12It began here in Washington.
38:15John Idenisi is a former Navy SEAL turned advisor on cyber operations to government.
38:20There were some tips that came in out of Baltimore to federal agents saying, you are a police officer, you really should take a look at this website.
38:33And oh, by the way, the only way you get to it is if you anonymize yourself through something called the Tor router.
38:39What they found was a website called Silk Road.
38:43And they were amazed when they were able to download this plugin on their browser, go into the Silk Road and then from there see literally they can make a purchase.
38:55It was like a buffet dinner for narcotics.
38:58Silk Road was a global drugs marketplace which brought together anonymous buyers and sellers from around the world.
39:07And what they found was people aren't just buying one or two instances of designer drugs, but they're buying massive quantity wholesale.
39:19In London, the tech community was watching closely.
39:23Thomas Olufsen was one of many interested in how much money the site was making.
39:28Well, in Silk Road, they have something called an escrow system.
39:33So if you want to buy drugs, you pay money into Silk Road as a facilitator and they keep the money in escrow until you sign off that you have had your drugs delivered.
39:43They will then release your money to the drug dealer.
39:48We're talking about several millions a day in trade.
39:51The extraordinary success of Silk Road attracted new customers to new illegal sites.
40:02This part of the internet even had a new name.
40:06The dark web.
40:08A dark website is impossible to shut down because you don't know where dark website is hosted or actually even where it's physically located or who's behind it.
40:17And there was one other thing which made Silk Road and its imitators difficult to stop.
40:27You paid with a new currency that only exists online called Bitcoin.
40:33Before, even if you had anonymity as a user, you could still track the transactions, the money flowing between persons.
40:41Because if you use your visa card, your ATM, bank transfer, Western Union, there's always money leaves a mark.
40:50This is the first time they can actually anonymously move money between two persons.
40:54Bitcoin is no longer an underground phenomenon.
41:06Buyers will buy Bitcoin at $445.
41:10Sellers will sell at $460.
41:13If you're buying less than half of Bitcoin, you'll have to go to market price.
41:17This Bitcoin event is taking place on Wall Street.
41:20Forty-five bid for $63.
41:26But how does the currency work?
41:31One of the people best placed to explain is Peter Todd.
41:35He's chief scientist for a number of Bitcoin companies, including one of the hottest, Dark Wallet.
41:41So what Bitcoin is, is it's virtual money.
41:47I can go give it to you electronically, you can give it to someone else electronically.
41:51The key thing to understand about Bitcoin is that these two people trading here are making a deal without any bank involvement.
41:58It's a form of electronic cash, and that has massive implications.
42:05So of course in normal electronic banking systems, what I would say is please transfer money from my account, someone else's account.
42:12But fundamentally, who owns what money is recorded by the bank, by the intermediary?
42:17What's really interesting about Bitcoin is this virtual money is not controlled by a bank, it's not controlled by government, it's controlled by an algorithm.
42:28The algorithm in question is a triumph of mathematics.
42:31This is a Bitcoin transaction in action.
42:38To pay someone in Bitcoin, the transaction must be signed using a cryptographic key, which proves the parties agreed to it.
42:46An unchangeable electronic record is then made of this transaction.
42:51This electronic record contains every transaction ever made on Bitcoin.
42:56It's called the blockchain, and it's stored in a distributed form by every user, not by a bank or other authority.
43:07The blockchain is really the revolutionary part of Bitcoin, but what's really unique about it is it's all public.
43:13So you can run the Bitcoin algorithm on your computer, and your computer is inspecting every single transaction to be sure that it actually followed the rules.
43:21And the rules are really what Bitcoin is. You know, that's the rules of the system, that's the algorithm that says things like you can only send money to one person at once, and we all agree to those rules.
43:32And Bitcoin has one other characteristic, which it shares with cash. It can be very hard to trace.
43:39Well, what's controversial about Bitcoin is that it goes back to something quite like cash. It's not like a bank account where a government investigator can just call up the bank and get all the records of who I've ever transacted with without any effort at all.
43:54You know, if they want to go and find out where I got my Bitcoins, they're going to have to ask me, they're going to have to investigate.
44:05The emergence of Bitcoin and the growth of the dark web was now leading law enforcement in Washington to take a close interest.
44:12Transactions in the dark web were unbelievably more enabled and in many cases could exist because of this virtual currency known as Bitcoin.
44:24So as people started to take a look at Bitcoin and understand how do we regulate this? How do we monitor this?
44:30Oh, my God, it's completely anonymous. We have no record.
44:33They started seeing transactions in the sort of the digital exhaust that led them into Silk Road.
44:40And so now you had criminal grounds to start taking a look at this coupled with the movement from the financial side and regulatory side on the virtual currency.
44:52So these two fronts began converging.
44:54The FBI began to mount a complex plot against the alleged lead administrator of Silk Road, who used the pseudonym Dread Pirate Roberts.
45:05They really started focusing on Dread Pirate Roberts and his role as not just a leader, but sort of the mastermind in the whole ecosystem of the platform, right?
45:17From management administratively to financial merchandising to vendor placement, recruitment, etc.
45:26Dread Pirate Roberts was believed to be Ross Ulbricht, listed on his LinkedIn entry as an investment advisor and entrepreneur from Austin, Texas.
45:36Taking him down was really almost a story out of a Hollywood movie.
45:42I mean, we had people that staged the death of one of the potential informants.
45:48We had undercover police officers acting as cocaine under kingpins inside Silk Road.
45:55So at the conclusion of all these different elements, they actually finally ended up bringing in Dread Pirate Roberts and now are trying to move forward with his trial.
46:06Whether or not he is Dread Pirate Roberts, Ulbricht's arrest in 2013 brought down Silk Road.
46:15In the process, the FBI seized $28.5 million from the site's escrow account, money destined for drug dealers.
46:26Yet the problem for the U.S. authorities was that their success was only temporary.
46:31The site is now up and running again.
46:38It re-emerged just two months later by some other guys that took the same code base, the same, actually the same site more or less.
46:46Just other people running the site because it's obviously a very, very profitable site to run.
46:53And Silk Road has now been joined by a host of other sites.
47:00One of the boom industries on the dark web is financial crime.
47:06Yet this website is quite focused on credit card numbers and stolen data.
47:10On here, for instance, is credit card numbers from around $5, $6 per credit card number paying in equivalent of bitcoins, totally anonymous.
47:20The cards are sold in something called a dump.
47:26I mean, it's quite a large number of entries.
47:29It's tens of thousands.
47:30To get everything you need to be able to buy stuff online with these credit cards.
47:35First name, last name, address, the card numbers, everything, the CVV number, everything but the PIN code, basically.
47:43The dark web is now used for various criminal activities.
47:49Drugs and guns, financial crime, and even child sexual exploitation.
47:54So is anonymity a genuine threat to society?
48:08A nightmare that should haunt us?
48:15This man, who leads Europe's fight against cybercrime, believes so.
48:19The TOR network plays a role because it hides criminals.
48:24I know it was not the intention, but that's the outcome.
48:27And this is my job to tell the society what is the trade-offs here.
48:32By having no possibilities to penetrate this, we will then secure criminals that they can continue their crimes on a global network.
48:40And despite the success over Silk Road and others, he is worried for the future.
48:50Our detection rate is dropping.
48:52It's very simple.
48:53The business model of a criminal is to make profit with low risk.
48:57And here you actually eliminate the risk because there is no risk to get identified.
49:02So either you have to screw up or be very unlucky or somebody rats you out, otherwise you are secure.
49:08So if you run a side operation, it's very, very difficult for the police to penetrate.
49:12So it's risk-free crime.
49:15So does the anonymity offered by the TOR network encourage crime or simply displace it?
49:22Those who work for the project are well aware of the charges it faces.
49:27There is often asserted certain narratives about anonymity.
49:30And of course, one of the narratives is that anonymity creates crime.
49:36So you hear about things like the Silk Road and you hear,
49:39oh, it's terrible, someone can do something illegal on the Internet.
49:42Well, welcome to the Internet.
49:43It is a reflection of human society where there is sometimes illegal behavior.
49:47These arguments aside, for users wanting to avoid surveillance, TOR has limitations.
49:55It's slow, content isn't automatically encrypted on exiting the network,
50:00and some have claimed a bug can de-anonymize users.
50:04TOR say they have a fix for this problem.
50:08Whilst the search for a solution to bulk surveillance continues,
50:11this man has a different approach.
50:16He is Eugene Kaspersky, CEO of one of the world's fastest-growing internet security companies.
50:24300 million users now rely on its software.
50:28For Kaspersky, widespread anonymity is not a solution.
50:32In fact, he thinks we need the absolute opposite, a form of online passport.
50:41My idea is that all the services in the Internet must be split.
50:48So they are non-critical, your personal emails, news from the Internet,
50:53you are chatting with your family, what else, leave them alone.
50:58So you don't need any ID, it's a place of freedom.
51:02And there are critical services like banking, financial services, banks,
51:08booking their tickets, booking the hotels or what else.
51:13So please present your ID if you do this.
51:19So it's a kind of balance, freedom and security.
51:23Anonymity and wearing the badge, wearing your ID.
51:26In his view, this shouldn't be a problem, as privacy has pretty much disappeared online anyway.
51:33The reality is that we don't have too much privacy in the cyberspace.
51:38If you want to travel, if you want to pay with your credit card,
51:42if you want to access Internet, forget about privacy.
51:45There is no way to go.
51:46That's a problem.
51:50Yet the idea that we could soon inhabit a world where our lives are ever more transparent is very unpopular.
51:58Some people say privacy is over, get over it.
52:01Uh, because basically we're trending towards the idea of just a complete transparent lives.
52:07completely transparent lives.
52:08I think that's nonsense,
52:09because information boundaries are important.
52:13So that means that we've got to have systems
52:15which respect them.
52:16So we've got to have the technology to produce,
52:19which can produce privacy.
52:26For those of us who might wish to resist surveillance,
52:29the hunt for that technology is now on.
52:33And it is to cryptographers
52:35that we must look for answers.
52:38If you want a demonstration of their importance
52:41to today's internet,
52:42you only have to come to this bunker in Virginia.
52:46Today, an unusual ceremony is taking place.
52:52Please center your eyes in the mirror.
52:55The internet is being upgraded.
52:59Your identity has been verified.
53:01All right, we're in.
53:01This is the biggest security upgrade to the internet
53:04in over 20 years.
53:06A group of tech specialists
53:08have been summoned by Steve Crocker,
53:12one of the godfathers of the internet.
53:15We discovered that there were some vulnerabilities
53:18in the basic domain name system structure
53:21that can lead to having a domain name hijacked
53:25or having someone directed to a false site.
53:28And from there, passwords can be detected
53:31and accounts can be cleaned out.
53:34At the heart of this upgrade is complex cryptography.
53:39Work began on adding
53:40cryptographically strong signatures
53:43to every entry in the domain name system
53:46in order to make it impossible
53:48to spoof or plant false information.
53:55To make sure these cryptographic codes remain secure,
53:58they are reset every three months.
54:03Three trusted experts from around the world
54:05have been summoned with three keys.
54:07Keys that open these safety deposit boxes.
54:10So now we are opening box one, two, four, zero.
54:13Inside are smart cards.
54:16When the three are put together,
54:17a master code can be validated,
54:20which resets the system for millions of websites.
54:24We are very lucky
54:25because every one of these people
54:26are respected members of the technical community,
54:30technical internet community.
54:31And that's what we were doing.
54:32Just like the internet itself,
54:34it was formed from the bottom up
54:35by techies from around the world.
54:38So step 22.
54:40A complex set of instructions is followed
54:43to make sure the system is ready to operate.
54:46Now we need to verify the KSR.
54:49This is the key step.
54:53So this is it.
54:54When I hit yes, the thing will be signed.
54:59There you go.
55:00Thank you very much.
55:06These scientists want to use cryptography
55:09to make the architecture of the internet more resilient.
55:13But for users, cryptography has another purpose.
55:17We can use it to encrypt our message content.
55:21So if we want to change the way that mass surveillance is done,
55:24encryption, it turns out,
55:26is one of the ways that we do that.
55:28When we encrypt our data,
55:30we change the value that mass surveillance presents.
55:32When phone calls are end-to-end encrypted such that no one else
55:36can decipher their content,
55:38thanks to the science of mathematics,
55:40of cryptography.
55:43And those who understand surveillance from the inside
55:46agree that it's the only way to protect our communications.
55:49The bottom line, and I'm repeating this again and again,
55:55is that encryption does work.
55:58It's the defense against the dark arts for the digital world.
56:02And this is something we all need to be not only implemented,
56:09but actively researching and improving on the academic way.
56:12However, there's a problem.
56:23It's still very difficult to encrypt content in a user-friendly way.
56:30One of the best ways to protect your privacy is to use encryption.
56:32But encryption is so incredibly hard to use.
56:35I am a technology person,
56:37and I struggle all the time to get my encryption products to work.
56:42And that's the next challenge.
56:45Developing an internet where usable encryption
56:47makes bulk surveillance,
56:49for those who want to avoid it, more difficult.
56:53Well, the moment the systems we're using
56:56are fairly insecure in lots of ways.
56:58I think the programmers out there
56:59have got to help build tools to make that easier.
57:05If encryption is to become more commonplace,
57:08the pressure will likely come from the market.
57:13The result of the revelations
57:14about a national security agency
57:15is people are becoming quite paranoid.
57:18It's important to not be paralyzed by that paranoia,
57:21but rather to express the desire for privacy.
57:26And by expressing the desire for privacy,
57:28the market will fill the demand.
57:31By making it harder, you protect yourself,
57:33you protect your family,
57:34but you also protect other people
57:35and just making it more expensive
57:38to surveil everyone all the time.
57:40In the end,
57:41encryption is all about mathematics.
57:44And for those who want more privacy,
57:46the numbers work in their favor.
57:49It turns out that it's easier in this universe
57:52to encrypt information
57:53much easier than it is to decrypt it
57:56if you're someone watching from the outside.
57:59The universe fundamentally favors privacy.
58:04We have reached a critical moment
58:06when the limits of privacy
58:08could be defined for a generation.
58:11We are beginning to grasp the shape of this new world.
58:15It's time to decide
58:17whether we are happy to accept it.
58:46Your identity has been verified.
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